PRINTED FROM CHICAGO SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.chicago.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright University of Chicago Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in CHSO for personal use.date: 07 June 2020

The Secret of Primitive Accumulation: The Political Economy of Anthropological Objects

The Secret of Primitive Accumulation: The Political Economy of Anthropological Objects

Chapter:

(p.149)
Chapter 7 The Secret of Primitive Accumulation: The Political Economy of Anthropological Objects

Source:

Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany

Publisher:

University of Chicago Press

DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226983462.003.0008

The exchanges that made up colonialism—exchanges of gifts, exchanges of commodities, and even exchanges of fire—both supplied anthropologists with objects and began the process of stripping those objects of their history. Perhaps like all exchanges they introduced a moment of instability that was particularly threatening for colonists and anthropologists. Even in the face of the overwhelming power exercised by colonists, the colonized often—intentionally or unintentionally—challenged European interpretations of the exchange. Indeed, the very notion of exchanges between colonizer and colonized threatened the sharp gap between European cultural peoples and colonized natural peoples on which European understandings of both anthropology and colonial rule depended. This chapter uses a number of exemplary exchanges to suggest the ways in which German anthropology was an integral part of a larger colonial political economic network.

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PRINTED FROM CHICAGO SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.chicago.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright University of Chicago Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in CHSO for personal use.date: 07 June 2020